


Battered Moonlight

by marginalia



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: F/F, shameless lucille love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-10-07
Packaged: 2019-01-10 06:55:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12293718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marginalia/pseuds/marginalia
Summary: Lucille longs to cry out herself, cry out like the ghosts, reach out and touch her - stain her - with hands dripping red.





	Battered Moonlight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thatworldinverted](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatworldinverted/gifts).



> Title from The Man-Moth by Elizabeth Bishop. No warnings on account of how everything warning-worthy is canonical.

It isn't as if she has ever had a choice. Not really, not in the end. And of course, the others were much easier to hate.

Margaret was so much older than both of them, and the first to steal Thomas away from her. Pamela had been useless physically and mentally, abandoned into their dubious care by her dying father, and she had driven Thomas further away, their honeymoon abroad feeding his nascent dreams of travel. Enola was the first one Thomas mourned, the kindness he felt for her and the longing he felt for their twisted child woven together.

Edith was different.

Edith was cream and gold. She was a butterfly with an iron will. She was light and day, she was sunshine, and she was the closest they came to picking one out together. She was the first one Lucille wanted to protect, a desire she shoved down deep as soon as she recognized it. She too could close her eyes to things that make her uncomfortable.

Edith is dangerous. Desire is dangerous. But she is still their last, best chance.

::

Lucille slips into trousers, pins up her hair, smashes in the head of Carter Cushing and, charged all through with an electric thrill, strides through the streets of Buffalo, her confidence drawing the sparkling eye of a young lady out too early, or perhaps too late.

This too is a thrill.

She keeps the clothes for her voyage back to England, accidentally packing them in the rush she will say if anyone asks, which they will not. She knows this is the way it must be, Thomas left behind, comforting the girl, small and sad and golden. She takes her comfort where she can.

On board the ship she spreads the outfit across the bed, considers standing on the deck, ramrod straight, hands clasped behind her. 

No one would touch her if she were a man.

::

When she finally arrives back at Allerdale Hall, cold and empty of anyone worth speaking with, she pours her time away into poetry. It is her quiet savior, after Thomas, and he does not even know. She writes the darkness of their lives and the light they might have had, but she shares it with no one.

The more knowledge of you people gain, the easier it is for them to hurt you, and Lucille has been hurt enough.

::

Edith enters Allerdale Hall cheerful, confident. She has yet to learn her place. She speaks of love and warmth, as if they could ever exist here, dark and cold for centuries. She makes a pet of that godforsaken dog, she asks for her own set of keys, she falls asleep next to Thomas as if all of these things are her birthright.

The ghosts will make things clear to her soon enough. The ghosts and finally the tea.

::

Lucille sees the ghosts too. How could she not? She sees them in the house, on the grounds, behind her eyelids even when she is on the other side of the ocean. They edge towards her, they curse, they drip red like the clay that covers what little of them remains.

But now she has started seeing an angel as well, Edith walking the halls in the night, a cloud of golden hair, a flowing white nightdress, and Lucille longs to cry out herself, cry out like the ghosts, reach out and touch her - stain her - with hands dripping red.

::

Lucille tests her. She brings Edith to the library, climbs the steps, caresses the keys with her long fingers, draws out the secret books, shows her the fore-edge paintings, watches the pink creep along Edith's cheeks, cresting the tips of her ears. Lucille's eyes on her, unblinking. 

Edith has no experience of anything that matters. Lucille has far too much.

Lucille recalls nights in the asylum, women together in the dark, sometimes patients finding some little comfort in each other, sometimes a nurse taking her payment in trade. She hears the noises still, the murmurs, the soft cries, and though she learned quickly to be quiet for Thomas, sometimes in the bath with one hand at her throat and one between her legs, she wonders what it would be like to scream.

::

Edith starts taking notice of her peculiarities, likes and dislikes. She takes initiative so quietly that Lucille doesn't realize it's happening, just that things are completed. Breakfast is made, baths are drawn, the dog is out from underfoot. She has more time alone, with her collections.

Edith has more opportunity to explore. 

Edith finds her poetry, twin threads of the choices Lucille felt she had to make and the woman she might have been if her family hadn't twisted her into the beast she became. 

Edith closes her eyes to what she does not wish to see about Lucille and Thomas, but allows her heart to ache at their brokenness. 

Edith, warm and confident in Thomas's love, shines her light on Lucille, but Lucille, like all things of the dark, unaccustomed to kindness, skitters away.

Edith reaches for her as if to ask, you're a ghost in your own life. How can we bring you back?

Lucille believes the time for saving is long past.

::

The snow has started to fall, but Edith and Thomas have not returned from town. It's too dark now for hope, and Lucille paces, climbs and descends the stairs repeatedly, tiring her body if not her mind. She sleeps fitfully, and in dreams Edith comes to her.

There's a hard place in Lucille where she goes to protect herself from the things she has to do, but now Edith lures her out of the darkness, softly, tenderly. Edith takes the lead, touches her only as she wishes to be touched, asks nothing in return but the sound of her desire.

Lucille wakes in the cold morning light, flushed and alone. 

She had drawn the vow from Thomas, that he would never fall in love with anyone but her. It was unthinkable that she need make a similar vow, but so much of her life has been unthinkable. She has never learned the difference between love and devouring, and she no longer knows which one of them is the thief: if Edith is taking Thomas from her, or if it is Thomas who is taking Edith.

::

There's a version of their story where they break free, a version where Lucille's gifts are taken seriously, where she sits adored at the piano in all of the best rooms in Europe, Edith's novels and Lucille's poetry are on the shelves of the smartest of libraries, and they are celebrated exactly as much as they wish and no more. They are Edie and Lucy and there are no more ghosts.

But it's too late for that. It was always too late for a world outside of Allerdale Hall. They are not a dream of a novel by Edith; they are a nightmare of a poem by Lucille. Edith came into her life as sunshine, but the light has grown dim and silver.

Edith is battered moonlight, and Lucille loves the night time the best.


End file.
